Nintendo: One Game Could Change Wii U's Fate

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata believes the introduction of one game could dramatically improve the Wii U's sales situation.

Iwata talked with investors last week after announcing another operating loss ($457 million USD) for the Japanese game company, with a large part of Nintendo's underperformance stemming from poor sales of Wii U. Nintendo only sold 2.7 million Wii U consoles last year and is predicting a so-called conservative sales estimate of 3.6 million units for the current fiscal year. The low forecast brought forth a question about the console's future from an investor, wondering if Nintendo could actually achieve yearly sales of 5 million units or even 10 million in the future.

"As for Wii U, we estimated 9 million units of hardware in sales in the last fiscal year, but many of you must be aware of the actual results, and the Wii U market has experienced a sharp downturn," Iwata said. "In order to recreate momentum and sell 5 million or 10 million units of hardware annually, there are indeed challenges that we must overcome."

With Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U on the horizon, Nintendo hopes to spur sales of the Wii U and create momentum, but Iwata wanted to stay realistic and provide conservative forecasts for the home console. Still, he believes a single game could save the Wii U, pointing out how Pokemon sparked the Game Boy handheld system in its latter years.

"The fate of a video game system is often influenced greatly by the introduction of a single title," Iwata said. "As many of you probably remember, before the release of the Pokemon game, Game Boy had been showing slow growth, and many people wondered whether it was the end of Game Boy. But the Pokemon game singlehandedly changed the landscape of the system, which then started to show the strongest sales in the lifecycle of the system."

As such, Iwata doesn't think Wii U has hit its sales peak, and he wants to work hard to ensure there's growth with the console over the next couple of years. The Nintendo president also wants to make sure Wii U owners are satisfied before releasing another console, even though the company has already been working on its next iteration of hardware.